I have found google to be aggravating enough these days that I've experimentally switched my default search engine to Yahoo. It feels a lot like the old (good) google, though only having 5 results per page is a bit disappointing. So far so good, will probably stick to it for a while.
I'm old enough to remember what AltaVista search and the rest were like before Google.
It feels exactly like that today.
Google didn't need to improve much over the years to stay in business; they only needed to keep ahead of the SEO spammers. They did that for a while. But now we have SundarGoogle which expended active energy getting worse and worse and worse.
Agreed. Interesting that Yahoo was your choice. I may try it as well (have experimented with DDG and Bing a bit, but haven't used Yahoo since it was the only option back in the day).
Off topic (sorry), but has the quality of searches been on a steady decline over the last year or two? If I'm not just imagining things, wonder if it is because they changed the algo or if there is too much noise for the algo to work well anymore. Frustrating nonetheless...
Disregarding search results, it's been impossible for me to learn over all these years when it will actually start listening to me. Unpredictable time, can't count on the beep, can't count on the lights... it used to be instant on, and I miss that.
Cached webpages have pretty much been dead since the pandemic, at least from my usage in the last few years.
There used to be a prominent cache link under the search results, then it moved to a weird overflow menu thing, and then finally about a year or more ago, Google exposed no cache version for most websites. This just seems like confirmation.
Still really shitty. I used it constantly. I hate new Google.
Ah, yes, thanks for the confirmation, now I think that was one of the reasons why my use of Google Search went from infrequent to negligible in the last years - it wasn't just about DuckDuckGo adding a targeted time search feature longer than a year.
I've given up on Google's ability to keep its products useful. For search, I switched to Kagi a few weeks back and haven't had to use Google for anything since.
I was using ddg as default for quite a while, and it sucked. I was constantly discovering that it was missing things that I knew existed, plus it's still got all the same ad problems as google (ignore what you asked for and give you whatever someone else paid to give you).
I started seeing people mention kagi in other threads about google here.
After seeing many mentions, and all positive, and the sales pitch made sense (you are the customer instead of the product), I tried it.
That was months ago and I haven't felt any desire to cancel yet.
There was a small desire to cancel initially because their pricing tiers at the time meant I actually had to care how many queries I made, to figure out what tier I needed, which was super agrevating. But just a few weeks later they changed their plans and although my rate went up a little, I no longer have to think about queries, and I get both myself and my wife. No longer agrevated.
That was the only hint of a wish to cancel, and it no longer exists.
I'm not even using most of it's coolest features yet like lenses and personal filters or ai. Just the basic search.
Besides, Kagi actually shows you results for the -exact- query you enter. It does not replace your query with whatever it thinks you want. Kagi will respect quotes and Boolean operators and other advanced features that google, DDG, et al simply ignore.
I find it nearly impossible to find anything on DDG because it's so aggressive about just straight up ignoring my query to show me something else. Kagi will quite simply give you anything in the index matching your query or nothing at all. You know, like how a search query is supposed to work.
Same here, and I haven't looked back. Totally worth the monthly fee.
I especially like the ability to block things from appearing in search results, like those pesky AI generated web pages that simply regurgitate other websites poorly, or Wikipedia 'clones'.
Ah, nice, I was wondering how I was going to go about making a global setting filtering out results from the likes Reddit : sounds like exactly what I was looking for, going to try it out, thanks !
